On the stairwell between the fourth and third floors, he whooshed past a man who was climbing up, while I ran straight into the guy. I felt as if I’d hit a lamppost and fell at his feet. He grasped me by the shoulders roughly as he helped me up, and only when I lifted my head did I realize it was the neighbor whose apartment we’d just broken into. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his glasses, only my own reflection. An empty garbage can was dangling from his left hand.
Kozma was long gone. I wrestled out of the neighbor’s grip and hurried down the stairs. He shouted after me, but I paid no attention. I didn’t stop till I got into my own apartment, where I slammed the door and leaned against it. I was sure my pulse would never slow down. I was so out of breath I almost didn’t hear the knocking.
Through the peephole I saw Kozma nervously glancing around the hallway. I quickly let him in.
“Are you insane?” I shouted. “He didn’t go to the market! He went to throw out his trash!”
“We have a bigger problem now,” Kozma replied. “Do you know what we forgot? To lock the door!”
I slept until late afternoon, tossing and turning, waking up even more tired. I was studying the ceiling, wondering how it could even be possible to be that uneven. Which construction company did it? Who approved it?
I dragged myself to the kitchen, stepping around a bunch of chess books which were not helping me much. I swallowed a handful of pills. Routine was routine, it didn’t matter if I’d gotten up six hours later than usual.
Like Kozma, I too had a framed photo from another time, only I kept it in an old suitcase under my bed. I would take it out every morning, wipe off any dust, and wonder how she’d look today, if she were alive, before carefully putting the picture back in the suitcase.
I opened a chess book to delay going outside. I read a section about the Slav defense, when the opponent declines to respond to the sacrificing of a pawn in a Queen’s Gambit. The purpose was to narrow down the opponent’s maneuvering space in the middle of the board. Too bad I probably wouldn’t have a chance to use it.
Eventually, I came out with unbridled trepidation. The thing I was afraid of most was that Kozma was right about our neighbor, that he would jump me in the hallway, push me back into my apartment, and torture me for hours.
Outside, the sky was grayish, but it was still too light for me. Smog, humidity, and concrete often raised the temperature by several degrees. Kozma was sitting at our table in the park when I arrived, staring into his lap, failing to notice me. Soon I realized why.
UNDER 70 ONLY was spray-painted in black across the table. Dog owners and young parents were frowning at us as if we were the ones who wrote it.
I don’t know what made me look around, but it seemed logical that they’d stick around to see our reaction. I spotted the girls sitting on a bench just outside the park fence, in two rows, on the seat and backrest, just like soccer players posing for a picture.
Gigi grabbed her chest as if in pain from an imaginary heart attack and keeled over the back. When she got up, she and her friends laughed at us. They had every right to. They’d scored a strong point on their home turf.
I wanted to go, but I couldn’t leave Kozma behind, so I sat down.
“What are we going to do now?” Kozma said.
“You’re asking me? It’s easy for you, he probably didn’t even see you. It’s always me who ends up bearing the brunt of your nonsense.”
Gigi and the girls lit cigarettes as one, losing interest in us. Triumph sometimes has that effect on people. Without a real challenge, it becomes boring. Our challenge was on the fourth floor, but his balcony was empty.
“Nothing’s going on,” Kozma said. “I’ve been watching the whole time.”
“You’re not giving up, are you?”
“The conversation we heard in the apartment? Why would anyone talk like that? When I think about it, he may have left the radio on in order to warn off accidental snoops or burglars, because when you hear the radio through the door, you assume someone’s home.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“Well, sometimes I do it myself.”
“And does it work?”
“I don’t know, but no one has ever broken in.”
We watched the balcony until it got dark. After that we squinted at it.
I don’t know what made me drop my gaze four stories to my ground-floor terrace, but when I did, I spied a movement through the windows. At first I thought I’d imagined it. Then it happened again. A shadow moved over from the kitchen to the living room. From my kitchen to my living room.
I turned to Kozma. “Did you see that?”
He gave a wide-eyed nod.
“You know I just shit my pants,” I said.
“Me too.”
I got up, but Kozma grabbed me by the wrist. “If you go through the yard, he will see you. Let’s go in through the front.”
My head was humming, the vein in my neck throbbing. When she saw us leaving, Gigi started rolling her clenched fists under her eyes as if crying. I let Kozma take my hand and lead me around the building. Smoking on the bench across the road, Mira looked at us as if we were old loonies. She was probably right.
The door to my apartment was slightly ajar, but there was no one inside. I found my garbage can emptied out in the middle of the living room. Everything else seemed intact.
“He’s screwing with us,” I said. “Now he’s broken into my apartment. But where did he get the keys? The lock doesn’t seem broken.” I shook my head, overwhelmed by a feeling of anger that replaced fear. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“War,” Kozma said.
Kozma turned me into a kibitzer, voyeur, spy. I waited in my hallway until after seven, when he knocked on my door three times. It was a signal that he saw the neighbor leave, this time hopefully farther than our dumpsters.
While we climbed to his floor, I didn’t care about running into anyone. When Kozma unlocked the door, I heard the voices again, one male and one female, and recognized the words “sonata” and “philharmonic.” I instinctively wanted to turn away, but Kozma smiled and walked into the room, calling me over. He pointed to a radio sitting on the windowsill.
We had no trouble searching the apartment because not only did it not contain any women — or suitcases or saws — but it was nearly empty. In the middle of the living room there was a double bed with clean sheets; a large mirror hung on the wall across from it.
The view from the window so high above my own was totally different. In the park, I made out a shadow of someone who looked like one of Gigi’s girls looking up, as if watching this particular apartment. Over the roofs you could see the river, black and swollen.
“Something here isn’t right,” Kozma said absently.
The room next to the living room was locked. None of the keys matched, but this didn’t stop my friend. He went on searching until he found a door in the kitchen. We looked at each other. It should not have been there on the apartment’s outer wall.
This door was unlocked. We carefully peeked inside, mustered up the courage to enter, and stepped into a completely different apartment. It was covered in bathroom tiles, like a hospital. We passed a reception desk and in one small room found a bed and ultrasound and EKG equipment.
“The cardiologist from the next building over,” I said.
“They drilled a hole through the double wall and made a passage. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve fallen into Wonderland.”